A majority of the Rhode Island
school districts with “1-1” programs where each student is issued a laptop have
a blanket policy of spying on the students and everything they do on their
laptops, during, before and after school hours, on or off school premises,
without any evidence (or even suspicion ) of wrongdoing.

The schools analogize this to
school locker searches, in which students are denied any Fourth Amendment
protections. But that (very dubious)
principle is being stretched beyond the breaking point, as school lockers are in
schools, whereas these laptop searches are being carried out remotely,
everywhere, anywhere.

Phishers are targeting PayPal
users not only for their login credentials but also for selfies of them holding
their ID cards.

This scam campaign starts off
like so many others. A user gets an
attack email falsely warning them that PayPal has suspended their account “for
security precaution.”

“Hi there,

“Our technical support and
customer department has recently suspected activities in your account.

“Therefore we have decided to
temporarly suspend your account until investigating your recent activiies. Such things can happen if you clicked a
suspecious link on social media or gave your password to someone else

“We’re always concerned about our
customers security so please help us recover your account by following the link
below.

The phishing email gives itself
away by its spelling errors and strange grammatical usage. But it does get some
things right.

The motive makes sense: North Korea needs
the money. As a result of its human
rights abuses, nuclear brinksmanship, and sociopathic aggression toward its neighbors, the country
faces crippling trade sanctions. Before
its hacking spree, it had already resorted to selling weapons to other rogue
nations, and even run its own human trafficking and methamphetamine
production operations. Cybercrime
represents just another lucrative income stream for a shameless, impoverished
government.

And it is
successful on nearly all of those fronts. Last year, Amazon sold six times as much
online as Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Nordstrom, Home Depot, Macy’s, Kohl’s,
and Costco did combined. Amazon also
generated 30 percent of all U.S. retail sales growth, online or offline.

Perspective. I know
a brand-new PhD in AI, perhaps it’s time for a startup?

Intel and Microsoft have been on something of an artificial
intelligence (AI) investment binge of late, with the chip and software giants
announcing a slew of deals this week via their respective VC arms — Intel
Capital and Microsoft Ventures.

“Soon, all lawyers will be automated.” Or at least required to take a few technology
classes?

…“Why don’t law
firms use project management software to track where they are in the process of
completing a deal and let customers see that?” Kan asked. But more important than the way in which law
firms interact with customers, Kan sees an opportunity to streamline the work
that is done in-house to make it more manageable for lawyers and those who work
at law firms.

“If you think about corporate legal work that’s done
today, some part of it is art and then some of it is repeatable processes,” Kan
told me. It’s those repeatable processes
that the Atrium team believes it can innovate on to make things more efficient.

Friday, June 16, 2017

Your Wi-Fi router, sitting
in the corner of your home accumulating dust and unpatched security flaws,
provides an attractive target for hackers. Including, according to a new WikiLeaks
release, the CIA.

On Thursday, WikiLeaks published a
detailed a set of descriptions and documentation for the CIA's router-hacking
toolkit. It's the latest drip in the months-long trickle of secret CIA files it's called Vault7,
and it hints at how the agency leverages vulnerabilities in common routers sold
by companies including D-Link and Linksys. The techniques range from hacking network
passwords to rewriting device firmware to remotely monitor the traffic that
flows across a target's network. After
reading up on them, you may find yourself itching to update your own
long-neglected access point.

Industrial companies from
around the world have been targeted in phishing attacks believed to have been
launched by cybercriminals located in Nigeria, Kaspersky Lab reported on
Thursday.

In October 2016, Kaspersky’s Industrial Control Systems
Cyber Emergency Response Team (ICS
CERT) noticed a significant increase in malware infection attempts
aimed at industrial organizations in the metallurgy, construction, electric
power, engineering and other sectors. The
security firm had observed
attacks against 500 organizations in more than 50 countries.

The attacks started with spear phishing emails carrying
documents set up to exploit an Office vulnerability (CVE-2015-1641)
patched by Microsoft in April 2015. The
phishing messages were well written and they purported to come from the
victim’s suppliers, customers, or delivery services.

“Modern technology has given those in power new abilities
to eavesdrop and collect data on innocent people. Surveillance Self-Defense is EFF’s
guide to defending yourself and your friends from surveillance by using secure
technology and developing careful practices. Select an article from our index
to learn about a tool or issue, or check out one of our playlists
to take a guided tour through a new set of skills.”

Hundreds of Nova Scotian hospital
patients may get to share a $1-million settlement in a case involving breaches
of their privacy.

Halifax’s Wagners Law Firm has
reached a proposed settlement with a former provincial health authority and if
it’s approved will offer $1,000 each
to nearly 700 plaintiffs they represent in a class-action lawsuit.

In 2012, the South West Nova District
Health Authority sent letters to 700 people, telling them an
employee had “inappropriately” accessed their health information, according to
a Wagners news release.

Facebook put the safety of its
content moderators at risk after inadvertently exposing their personal details
to suspected terrorist users of the social network, the Guardian has learned.

The security lapse affected more
than 1,000 workers across 22 departments at Facebook who used the company’s
moderation software to review and remove inappropriate content from the
platform, including sexual material, hate speech and terrorist propaganda.

A bug in the software, discovered
late last year, resulted in the personal profiles of content moderators
automatically appearing as notifications in the activity log of the Facebook
groups whose administrators were removed from the platform for breaching the
terms of service. The personal details
of Facebook moderators were then viewable to the remaining admins of the group.

Canadians
pay some of the highest
wireless rates of any G7 nation, and to add insult to injury, they often
have to shell out $50 or more to unlock cellphones when switching operators. However, the nation's wireless regulator, the
CRTC, has now ordered carriers to unlock devices for free and decreed that all
new smartphones must be sold unlocked. The
move was prompted by excoriating public criticism on unlocking fees after the
CRTC requested
comment on new wireless rules.

The European institution has accused the Californian
technology giant of promoting its own shopping service in its search results
over those of its competitors, alongside
two other antitrust investigations: One over Android, its mobile operating
system, and another relating to its online search advertising business.

A buried line
in a new Facebook report about chatbots’ conversations with one another offers
a remarkable glimpse at the future of language.

In the
report, researchers at the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research
lab describe using machine learning to train their “dialog agents” to
negotiate. (And it turns out bots are
actually quite good at dealmaking.) At
one point, the researchers write, they had to tweak one of their models because
otherwise the bot-to-bot conversation “led to divergence from human language as
the agents developed their own language for negotiating.”

An extreme use of texting?But manslaughter?What if they
had been in different states?Or if the
victim had been an adult and the girl a minor?

…A juvenile court
judge now finds himself at the center of a legal quagmire: Should he set a
legal precedent in Massachusetts by convicting Carter of manslaughter for
encouraging Roy to take his own life through dozens of text messages? Or should he acquit her and risk sending a
message that Carter’s behavior was less than criminal?

…Carter is
accused of involuntary manslaughter, a charge that can be brought in
Massachusetts when someone causes the death of another person when engaging in
reckless or wanton conduct that creates a high degree of likelihood of
substantial harm.

…Daniel Medwed, a
law professor at Northeastern University, said the judge has a difficult task
in determining whether Carter’s actions rise to the level of manslaughter. There is no Massachusetts law against
encouraging someone to kill themselves. Medwed
said the judge could consider Carter “morally blameworthy,” but “moral blame
doesn’t always equal legal accountability. ”

Martin Healy, chief legal counsel of the Massachusetts Bar
Association, said the case also presents some novel issues of law on the use of
cellphones and text messages. Carter was
not with Roy when he killed himself, but she was talking on the phone with him
as his truck filled with carbon monoxide.

…For Amazon, the
acquisition suddenly gives them a sprawling brick-and-mortar presence and
access to well-heeled consumers. The
company has been experimenting with groceries, primarily through its
AmazonFresh delivery program, but this deal makes clear the size of its
ambitions.

I find this hard to believe.(correlation does not imply causation).Does this also apply to
non-coders?

Lottery players will not be able to purchase Powerball or Mega Millions tickets in
Illinois after the end of this month unless the ongoing state budget impasse is
resolved, lottery officials said Thursday.

…It is the latest
black eye for the beleaguered state lottery, which has garnered headlines in
recent years for failing to pay its winners, and for the way it was run under
the first private management agreement in the nation.

In a series of stories published over the past six months,
the Tribune found the company tasked with running the lottery — Northstar
Lottery Group — failed to award more than 40 percent of the grand prizes in its
biggest instant ticket games, sometimes ending games before any top prizes were
claimed.

Netflix has, for the first time, surpassed cable in total
subscribers according to Leichtman Research. US cable companies have 48.61 million subscribers
while Netflix has just hit 50.85 million. The numbers don't count minor cable networks,
which could in themselves amount to 5% of total cable customers.

Backup and Sync is a new service coming soon from
Google. On June 28th you will be able to
install Backup and Sync on your Mac or Windows computer. The service will let you have your desktop
files or other folder files automatically backed up to your Google Drive
account. You've always been able to
quickly move files from your desktop to Google Drive through Drive desktop
clients, but Backup and Sync will let you streamline that process.

Owl
Eyes is a free tool that
provides teachers with a good way to provide students with guidance while they
are reading classic literature. Owl Eyes
provides teachers with tools to insert annotations and questions into classic
literature. Students can see the
annotations and questions that their teachers add to the digital text. Teachers have the option to create online
classrooms through which they can monitor their students' progress through a
text and view their students' annotations and answers to questions. The texts available through Owl Eyes are
mostly classic works that are in the public domain.

Thursday, June 15, 2017

Southern Oregon University has
announced that it is the latest organization to fall victim to a business email
compromise (BEC) attack after fraudsters tricked the educational establishment
into transferring money into a bank account under their control.

According to media reports, the
university fell for the scam in late April when it wired $1.9 million into a
bank account. They believed they were
paying Andersen Construction, a contractor responsible for constructing a
pavilion and student recreation center.

NPR – If Voting Machines Were Hacked, Would
Anyone Know? – “As new reports emerge about Russian-backed attempts to hack
state and local election systems [Link], U.S. officials are increasingly worried
about how vulnerable American elections really are. While the officials say they see no evidence
that any votes were tampered with, no one knows for sure. Voters were assured repeatedly last year that
foreign hackers couldn’t manipulate votes because, with few exceptions, voting
machines are not connected to the Internet. “So how do you hack something in cyberspace,
when it’s not in cyberspace?” Louisiana
Secretary of State Tom Schedler said shortly before the 2016 election. But even if most voting machines aren’t
connected to the Internet, says cybersecurity expert Jeremy Epstein, “they are
connected to something that’s connected to something that’s connected to the
Internet…”

Nextgov – “Congressional concern is
climbing—not for the first time—about government agencies using an anti-virus
tool made by the respected but Russia-based security firm Kaspersky Lab. The dustup is a case study in why securing
government systems is devilishly complicated…”

The Internet, a historically unparalleled source of
information and expression, has also become a playground for censorship,
punishment and propaganda. Not a day goes by where an individual is not
arrested, prosecuted or threatened for the content of a tweet or a post. States are ordering internet shutdowns in
times of public protest, elections, and even school exams. Governments enjoy surveillance capabilities
that drill deep into the lives of journalists, activists, political opposition,
and regular citizens.

1.Network
shutdowns devastate individuals and their communities … and are spreading:

2.Surveillance
is more secretive and invasive than ever:

3.States
must back up their commitments with action:

4.Companies
are on the front line of the fight for users’ rights:

5.Transparency
needed across the board:

Read the full report, which also discusses the erosion of
net neutrality, and the human rights impact of standards developing
organizations like the Internet Engineering Task Force, and its supplementary
materials, here.

GOOD: “…According to the U.S.
Geological Survey, prior to 2009, when oil and gas fracking in Oklahoma and
neighboring states really started to boom, Oklahoma experienced roughly two earthquakes a year. Now, the state sees as many as two or three
earthquakes each day, leaping from an annual average of 99 between
2009-2013 to 585 in 2014. By 2015,
the state endured 887 earthquakes, including 30 that topped 4.0 on the
Richter scale…”

Amazon's new Dash Wand is the company's latest
connected device aims to make buying groceries from AmazonFresh delivery service or other items from
Amazon.com even easier.

About the size of a remote control, Dash
Wand incorporates Alexa, the virtual personal assistant persona that drives
Amazon's Echo devices. That means users
can tell it what to order or they can scan in product codes. It can search for
recipes but, unlike Echo, it will not
play music. [Sounds like a project for my Ethical Hacking students!Bob]

Research tools?My
students are not encouraged to use “old” articles, which I define as more than
12 months old. Perhaps I should make an
exception here?

Google Scholar Blog: “Classic Papers: Articles That Have Stood The Test of
Time – “Scholarly research is often about the latest findings – the newest
knowledge that our colleagues have gleaned from nature. Some articles buck this pattern and have
impact long after their publication. Today,
we are releasing Classic Papers, a collection of
highly-cited papers in their area of research that have stood the test of time.For each area, we list the ten most-cited
articles that were published ten years earlier. This release of classic papers consists of
articles that were published in 2006 and is based on our index as it was in May
2017. To browse classic papers, select
one of the broad areas and then select the
specific research field of your interest…The list of classic papers includes articles that presented new
research. It specifically excludes
review articles, introductory articles, editorials, guidelines, commentaries,
etc. It also excludes articles with
fewer than 20 citations and, for now, is limited to articles written in
English.”

“As defined by Bernard Reilly (2012), president of the
Center for Research Libraries, text mining is “the automated processing of
large amounts of digital data or textual content for the purpose of information
retrieval, extraction, interpretation, and analysis.” The first step is to find or build a corpus,
or the collection of text that a researcher wishes to work with. Most often researchers will need to download
this corpus to either their computers or an alternative storage platform. Once this has been done, different tools can
be used to find patterns, biases, and other trends that are present in the text
(Reilly 2012). Within higher education, text mining is most often found among the
digital humanities and linguistics studies. However it is growing in popularity in the
science and technology fields…”

VC firm Andreessen Horowitz explains why it led a $23 million
round in a social network for data

Andreessen Horowitz, one of Silicon Valley's most
prominent venture capital firms, has placed a bet on a start-up called Instabase
that's quietly building a web service where data scientists and less technical
users can work with data, CNBC has learned.

…So in 2014,
Anant Bhardwaj and his colleagues at MIT's renowned Computer Science and
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), along with other academic
researchers, detailed a new system for data called DataHub in a paper.
DataHub, now available on GitHub under an
open-source license, forms
the basis of Instabase.

But the start-up's web service is billed as being in
preview and only lets a small number of people start using it every few days.

Once on the website, users can post data sets, which other
users can explore, query, chart and contribute to them. The service keeps track of changes to data
just as GitHub stores updates to code files.

Perspective.IBM
wins at Chess and Go – this is the best Microsoft can do?

The theme of this coming Thirsty Thursday is “You Might Be
the Father’s Day,” and the team will be distributing pregnancy tests to fans so
that, according to the promotion, “you'll know if you need to return for
Sunday's Father's Day game.”

Bloomberg: “Russia’s cyberattack on the U.S. electoral
system before Donald Trump’s election was far more widespread than has been
publicly revealed, including incursions into voter databases and software
systems in almost twice as many states as previously reported. In Illinois, investigators found evidence that
cyber intruders tried to delete or alter voter data. The hackers accessed software designed to be
used by poll workers on Election Day, and in at least one state accessed a
campaign finance database. Details of
the wave of attacks, in the summer and fall of 2016, were provided by three
people with direct knowledge of the U.S. investigation into the matter. In all, the Russian hackers hit
systems in a total of 39 states, one of them said…The new details, buttressed by a
classified National Security Agency document recently disclosed by the Intercept, show
the scope of alleged hacking that federal investigators are scrutinizing as
they look into whether Trump campaign officials may have colluded in the
efforts.But they also paint a worrisome
picture for future elections…”

You should revisit all those activities you thought were
Okay.Laws change.Security techniques change.And the ability to detect a problem should
get better with time.

The university scrambled to
safeguard the files late Tuesday after learning The Daily had
discovered the breach last week.

[…]

In just 30 of the hundreds of
documents made publicly discoverable on Microsoft Office Delve, there were more
than 29,000 instances in which students’ private information was made public to
users within OU’s email system.Each
instance could constitute a violation of the Family Educational Rights and
Privacy Act, which gives students control over who can access their educational
records.

Federal agencies averaged a "B" grade in
information technology procurement in their latest report cards, with one
agency being the first to score an "A."

The fourth version of the Federal Information Technology
Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA) scorecard dropped Tuesday morning, with the B
average the same as in the last report, six months ago.

…In the latest
report card, the United States Agency for International Development scored the
first ever A-range grade — an A-plus.Commerce, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Justice,
Veterans Affairs, the Environmental Protection Agency and the General Services
Administration all scored in the B range.Defense received the only F.

Tuesday, June 13, 2017

They still think unencrypted communication is
acceptable!!!Yes, unencrypted
communications and encrypted communications will be intercepted at exactly the
same rate.However, once intercepted, unencrypted
emails can be read 100% of the time and encrypted emails 0% of the time.Do you really want to tell your clients, “Your
case/data/whatever is not important
enough to protect?”

“They’re engineered to make a 3,000-mile trip, so they
look good but taste like a piece of wood,’’ said Shawn Baldwin, Wal-Mart Stores
Inc.’s senior vice president for produce and global food sourcing.

…Wal-Mart
considered more than 100 varieties of seeds and tested 20. Wal-Mart employees spent six months grading
the cantaloupes on attributes like flavor, texture and aroma.

…The winner was
dubbed the Sweet Spark, after the yellow sunburst in Wal-Mart’s logo.
The designer cantaloupes are available
in 200 U.S. stores with a full roll-out planned for fall. Sweet Spark is not genetically modified.

…Up next:
tomatoes. Wal-Mart’s Baldwin said he
wants to replicate the blend of sweetness and acidity in the San Marzano
variety of Naples, Italy.

Sabrina I. Pacifici has completely revised and
updated her guide, which she first published in 2005 and has updated yearly
since that time. A wide range of free sites with expertly sourced content
specific to researchers focused on business, finance, government data, analysis
and news from the US and around the world, are included in this article. The resources in this guide are the work of
corporate, government, academic, advocacy and news sources and individuals or
groups using Open Source applications. This
guide is pertinent to professionals who are actively engaged in maintaining a
balanced yet diverse group of reliable, actionable free and low cost sources
for their daily research.

Some readers might appreciate an update as to what
happened when Bronx-Lebanon Hospital Center and iHealth Solutions
sent legal
threat letters to this site after I notified them and reported that they
were leaking
protected health information.As I
previously noted,
I was – and remain – very grateful to Covington
& Burling for their representation of me and this site in the matter. Their entrance into the matter produced an
immediate shift in the law firms’ tones from strident demands to requests.

But the story doesn’t end there, and this might be
categorized under your “payback’s a bitch” category. Read on….

It seems that the hospital and vendor had also sent threat
letters to Kromtech Security Research Center, who had discovered
the leak.For reasons that are not
totally clear to me, Kromtech
quickly agreed to the lawyers’ request that they destroy all the data they had
downloaded in their research.

Any relief the vendor and hospital may have felt over
Kromtech’s cooperation was likely short-lived, however. Kromtech informed me that they were subsequently asked to tell the entities which
patients’ data they had downloaded so the entities would know whom
to notify. But of course, Kromtech could
not provide that information because they had deleted all the data in response
to the entities’ first demand/request. D’oh?

Now the entities could just notify everyone who had
PHI/PII on the server, of course, but it seemed like they were trying to narrow
the universe to only those whose data wound up in Kromtech’s hands – or this
site’s – or NBC News’ hands. And now
Kromtech could not tell them which patients had data in the 500 mb of data they
had downloaded and then destroyed.

But Kromtech had sent a subset of that data to
DataBreaches.net, who had not destroyed the data it possessed. If DataBreaches.net wanted to be helpful, it
could go through all the data and let the entities know which patients had data
in there, right?

Would this be a good time to remind everyone that the
entities had threatened me and this site?

And would it be important to point out that they never
directly apologized to me for their heavy-handed threats?

I might have been able to spare the vendor and hospital
some notifications if I was willing to donate my time to going through files to
compile information for them, but I’m not willing.

I’m not willing, in part, because I do not want to be
going through PHI if it’s not for my reporting purposes. And I’m not willing because why should I have
to spend my valuable time compiling information for entities that tried to
bully me and who now need my help to help them clean up their mess??

So what are the lessons that I wish entities and their
lawyers would learn from all this?

1.Don’t
rush to send legal threat letters. What
your mother taught you about catching more flies with honey than vinegar
appears true here, too; and

2.If
you wouldn’t send a legal threat to the New York Times over their
reporting, don’t send one to me. This
site may be small, under-funded, under-staffed, and under-appreciated, but with
the support of great law firms like Covington & Burling, this site will
always fight back against attempts to erode press freedom or chill speech.

With increasing access to mobile devices and the internet,
the amount of data created annually worldwide is predicted to soar to 180
zettabytes (180 trillion gigabytes) in 2025, with approximately 80
billion devices connected to the Internet.

1. Have a clear understanding of how personal data
is used and managed in your organisation.Some questions that business leaders need to
ask include what personal data has been collected, who has access to this data,
whether the purposes of processing of such personal data are lawful, where and
how it is kept and secured, and how long such personal data is kept on file.

2. Conduct regular audits and penetration testing.The authorities do recognise the fact
that cyber criminals often use sophisticated measures in their attacks. However, as seen with the many data breaches
around the world, it is most often the case that the organisation itself has
failed to have sufficient security measures in place. It is also a known fact that many
organisations are not doing enough to protect customer data or their important
data. At the bare minimum, organisations
need to meet the regulatory standards for data protection and compliance.

3. Be willing to seek external advice.By working closely with professionals such as
specialised lawyers with the relevant expertise, organisations will be able to
have a better understanding of other factors that could affect their business
decisions, such as a digital transformation initiative to move data to the
cloud.

A New Jersey saying, “Sometimes it’s easier to hide bits
and pieces than a whole body.”

The Washington Post to start experimenting with audio
articles using Amazon Polly

The Washington Post today announced it has started
experimenting with audio articles using Amazon
Polly, a service that converts article text into lifelike speech. For the next month, mobile users will be able
to listen to an audio version of four articles daily across business,
lifestyle, technology and entertainment news categories.

Wal-Mart
Stores, the largest U.S. grocer, is testing lower prices in 11 U.S. states and pushing vendors to undercut rivals by 15%. Wal-Mart, the world's biggest retailer, is
expected to spend about $6 billion to regain its title as the low-price leader,
analysts said.

…The furious pace
of expansion by Aldi and Lidl is likely to further disrupt the U.S. grocery
market, which has seen 18 bankruptcies since 2014. The two chains are also upending established
UK grocers like Tesco and Wal-Mart's UK arm, ASDA.

An Easyjet flight made an emergency landing in Germany
after British passengers were overheard talking about a “bomb”, it has emerged.

…Police have
given few details of the investigation, but according to unconfirmed German
press reports its is now thought the emergency was a false alarm and the plane
was never in danger.

Passengers were evacuated from the aircraft by emergency
slides, and one of the three men’s bags was destroyed in a controlled
explosion.

But a search of the
destroyed bag and aircraft found no trace of an explosive device or other
hazardous materials.

…German police have not commented on the content of
the conversation beyond saying it had “terrorist content”, but according to
details leaked to the German media the men were talking about “a bomb or
explosives.”

Concerned passengers alerted the cabin crew. They told the captain, who decided to divert
to Cologne.

…“We searched the
plane with sniffer dogs all night,” a police spokesman told Bild newspaper. “There were no traces of explosives in the
aircraft or in the suspects’ luggage.”

NSA backtracks on sharing number of Americans caught in
warrant-less spying

For more than a year, U.S. intelligence officials
reassured lawmakers they were working to calculate and reveal roughly how many
Americans have their digital communications vacuumed up under a warrant-less
surveillance law intended to target foreigners overseas.

This week, the Trump
administration backtracked, catching lawmakers off guard and alarming civil
liberties advocates who say it is critical to know as Congress weighs changes
to a law expiring at the end of the year that permits some of the National
Security Agency's most sweeping espionage.

…Coats
said "it remains infeasible to generate an exact, accurate, meaningful,
and responsive methodology that can count how often a U.S. person's
communications may be collected" under the law known as Section 702 of the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

He told the Senate
Intelligence Committee that even if he dedicated more resources the NSA would
not be able to calculate an estimate, which privacy experts have said could be
in the millions.

The statement ran counter
to what senior intelligence officials had previously promised both publicly and
in private briefings during the previous administration of President Barack
Obama, a Democrat, lawmakers and congressional staffers working on drafting
reforms to Section 702 said.

In San Francisco’s public schools, Marc Benioff, the chief
executive of Salesforce, is giving middle school principals $100,000
“innovation grants” and encouraging them to behave more like start-up founders
and less like bureaucrats.

In Maryland,
Texas, Virginia and other states, Netflix’s chief, Reed Hastings, is
championing a popular math-teaching program where Netflix-like algorithms
determine which lessons students see.

And in more than 100 schools nationwide, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s
chief, is testing one of his latest big ideas: software that puts children in
charge of their own learning, recasting their teachers as facilitators and
mentors.

In the space of
just a few years, technology giants have begun remaking the very nature of
schooling on a vast scale, using some of the same techniques that have made
their companies linchpins of the American economy. Through their philanthropy, they are
influencing the subjects that schools teach, the classroom tools that teachers
choose and fundamental approaches to learning.

Links

About Me

I live in Centennial Colorado. (I'm not actually 100 years old., but I hope to be some day.) I'm an independant computer consultant, specializing in solving problems that traditional IT personnel tend to have difficulty with... That includes everything from inventorying hardware & software, to converting systems & data, to training end-users. I particularly enjoy taking on projects that IT has attempted several times before with no success. I also teach at two local Universities: everything from Introduction to Microcomputers through Business Continuity and Security Management. My background includes IT Audit, Computer Security, and a variety of unique IT projects.